“Three corns and one roast raven,” said Dolorous Edd. “Very good, m’lord, only Hobb’s made boiled eggs, black sausage, and apples stewed with prunes. The apples stewed with prunes are excellent, except for the prunes. I won’t

eat prunes myself. Well, there was one time when Hobb chopped them up with chestnuts and carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook, my lord. They’ll prune you when you least expect it.”

“Later.” Breakfast could wait; Stannis could not. “Any trouble from the stockades last night?”

“Not since you put guards on the guards, m’lord.”

“Good.” A thousand wildlings had been penned up beyond the Wall, the captives Stannis Baratheon had taken when his knights had smashed Mance Rayder’s patchwork host. Many of the prisoners were women, and some of the

guards had been sneaking them out to warm their beds. King’s men, queen’s men, it did not seem to matter; a few black brothers had tried the same thing. Men were men, and these were the only women for a thousand leagues.

“Two more wildlings turned up to surrender,” Edd went on. “A mother with a girl clinging to her skirts. She had a boy babe too, all swaddled up in fur, but he was dead.”

“Dead,” said the raven. It was one of the bird’s favorite words. “Dead, dead, dead.”

“Religion will save us,” I said. Since when I could remember,religion had been very close to my heart.

“Religion?” Mr. Kumar grinned broadly. “I don’t believe inreligion. Religion is darkness.”Darkness? I was puzzled. I thought, Darkness is the lastthing that

religion is. Religion is light. Was he testing me? Washe saying, “Religion is darkness,” the way he sometimes said inclass things like “Mammals lay eggs,”

to see if someone wouldcorrect him? (“Only platypuses, sir.”)”There are no grounds for going beyond a scientificexplanation of reality and no sound

reason for believinganything but our sense experience. A clear intellect, closeattention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will exposereligion as

superstitious bosh. God does not exist.” -Did he say that? Or am I remembering the lines of lateratheists? At any rate, it was something of the

sort. I had neverheard such words.
“Why tolerate darkness? Everything is here and clear, if onlywe look carefully.”He was pointing at Peak. Now though I had greatadmiration

Eating delicious food is a kind of enjoyment for all people. Nowadays,

Chinese people are increasingly demanding to eat. Many people are especially

keen on stimulating food to stimulate taste buds. After all, you are my favorite spicy stick, “bullies don’t know what citronella looks like”, “I always thought Weilong spicy stick is the most sanitary in the spicy stick industry.” From the photos, we can see that a very obvious insect is not citronella at all. We hope that relevant departments can investigate it clearly and give consumers a fair answer.

Don’t be keen on stimulating food to stimulate taste buds.

Spicy sticks are almost the first choice for these eaters. Many people think about eating almost every day, such as Weilong, which has a very high reputation in China, and has since gone out of the country. Even the spicy strips produced by some unknown enterprises can not help salivating in the eyes of food.

Everyone thinks that big brands are trustworthy. Weilong products taste very good. But even Weilong has been exposed the news of food hygiene. Are they really clean?

Next up is the scandal about Weilong. Recently, a customer ate something suspected of insects in Weilong hot pot, which made people sick to think about.

A netizen in Luohe, Henan Province, reported that he had eaten worms in Weilong spicy hot pot he bought online. When inquiring about customer service in online stores, the other party at first denied that it was citronella (a kind of hot pot spice) in the pot, which was like this after the water swelled, but may have a far-fetched conscious reason and expressed willingness to refund to customers.

Customer service this inconsistent attitude is unavoidable to worry about, Weilongdai manufacturers said, will investigate the reasons, consumers will be compensated for mental damage.

The netizen said, “Today I ate a big bug in the hot pot, and his body was broken in half. Then I thought the bug was in the sauce bag of the hot pot. Calling customer service, he said it was citronella, their spice. Later, to prove that it was not spice, my roommate and I dug out the corpse of the insect from the garbage can. Their customer service then changed their words and said that we must turn over the hot pot we had today and take pictures before we can prove that the bug is known and let us send it back to him.

This food safety scandal immediately triggered a heated discussion among netizens. To this end, netizens commented, “Never eat any more”, “Customer service will always be like this. They always feel that someone will come to deceive her when they are bored.” “How do I feel like I know”, “Spicy sticks” and other things are inevitable. The main reason is that customer service does not have a correct attitude to admit mistakes”,”Weilong I ordered you to do so.” Don’t spoil my good feelings! After all, you are my favorite spicy stick, “bullies don’t know what citronella looks like”, “I always thought Weilong spicy stick is the most sanitary in the spicy stick industry.”

From the photos, we can see that a very obvious insect is not citronella at all. We hope that relevant departments can investigate it clearly and give consumers a fair answer.

The company had not only a new logo, but a new name. No longer was it Next. It was NeXT. Others might not have understood the need to obsess over a logo, much less pay $100,000 for one. But for Jobs it meant that NeXT was

starting life with a world-class feel and identity, even if it hadn’t yet designed its first product. As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.

In order to translate the NeXT logo into the look of real products, Jobs needed an industrial designer he trusted. He talked

to a few possibilities, but none of them impressed him as much as the wild Bavarian he had imported to

Apple: Hartmut Esslinger, whose frogdesign had set up shop in Silicon Valley and who, thanks to Jobs, had a lucrative contract with Apple. Getting

IBM to permit Paul Rand to do work for NeXT was a small miracle willed into

existence by Jobs’s belief that reality can be distorted. But that was a snap

compared to the likelihood that he could convince Apple to permit Esslinger to work for NeXT.

This did not keep Jobs from trying. At the beginning of November 1985, just five weeks after Apple filed suit against him,

Jobs wrote to Eisenstat and asked for a dispensation. “I spoke with Hartmut Esslinger this weekend and he

suggested I write you a note expressing why I wish to work with him and frogdesign on the new products for

NeXT,” he said. Astonishingly, Jobs’s argument was that he did not know what Apple had in the works, but Esslinger did.

“NeXT has no knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s

product designs, nor do other design firms we might deal with, so it is possible to inadvertently design similar looking

products. It is in both Apple’s and NeXT’s best interest to rely on Hartmut’s professionalism to make sure this does

not occur.” Eisenstat recalled being flabbergasted by Jobs’s audacity,

and he replied curtly. “I have previously expressed my concern on behalf of Apple that you are engaged in a business course

which involves your utilization of Apple’s confidential business information,” he wrote. “Your letter does not alleviate my concern in any way. In fact it heightens my

concern because it states that you have ‘no knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s product designs,’ a

statement which is not true.” What made the request all the more astonishing to Eisenstat was that it was Jobs who, just a year earlier,

When the banquet was concluded, Liu Bei thanked the Emperor and went out of the Palace. And from this time he was very generally styled the “Imperial Uncle.”

When Cao Cao returned to his palace, Xun Yu and his fellow advisers went in to see him.

Xun Yu said, “It is no advantage to you, Illustrious Sir, that the Emperor recognizes Liu Bei as an uncle.”

“Liu Bei may be recognized as uncle, but he is under my orders since I control the decrees of the Throne. He will be all the more ready to obey. Beside I will keep him here under the pretense of having him near his sovereign, and he will be entirely in my hands. I have nothing to fear. The man I fear is Yang Biao, who is a relative of the two Yuan brothers. Should Yang Biao conspire with them, he is an enemy within and might do much harm. He will have to be removed.”

Hence Cao Cao sent a secret emissary to say that Imperial Guardian Yang Biao was intriguing with Yuan Shu, and on this charge Yang Biao was arrested and imprisoned. And his death would have been compassed had his enemy dared.

But just then the Governor of Beihai, Kong Rong, was at the capital, and he remonstrated with Cao Cao, saying, “Yang Biao comes from a family famed for virtue for at least four generations. You cannot trump up so foolish a charge as that against him.”

“It is the wish of His Majesty！” retorted Cao Cao.

“If the child Emperor Cheng of Zhou Dynasty had put Duke Chao to death, could the people have believed Duke Zhou, the Regent Marshal, had nothing to do with it？”

So Cao Cao had to relinquish the attempt, but he took away Yang Biao’s offices and banished him to his family estate in the country.

So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a consumer marketer who knew

advertising and had the corporate polish that would play well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John Sculley, president of the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had been an advertising and publicity triumph.

When Jobs gave a talk to Stanford business students, he heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class earlier. So he told Roche he would be happy to meet him.

Sculley’s background was very different from Jobs’s. His mother was an Upper East Side Manhattan matron who wore white gloves when she went out, and his father was a proper Wall Street lawyer. Sculley was sent off to St.

Mark’s School, then got his undergraduate degree from Brown and a business degree from Wharton. He had risen through the ranks at PepsiCo as an innovative marketer and advertiser, with little passion for product development or information technology.

Sculley flew to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his two teenage children from a previous marriage. He took them to visit a computer store, where he was struck by how poorly the products were marketed. When his kids asked

why he was so interested, he said he was planning to go up to Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs. They were totally blown away. They had grown up among movie stars, but to them Jobs was a true celebrity.

One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”

Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.” In an interview a few years

later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall

and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of packaging and presentation. People do judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-color design and kept trying to make it look qinpad

better. “He got the guys to redo it fifty times,” recalled Alain Rossmann, a member of the Mac team who married Joanna Hoffman. “It was going to be thrown in the trash as soon as the consumer opened it, but he was obsessed

by how it looked.” To Rossmann, this showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on expensive packaging while they were trying to save money on the memory chips. But for

When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see shlf1314

them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first.qinpad

Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson.shlf1314

Espinosa unveiled his inspired solution: “The Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the user to tweak and personalize the look of the calculator by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the buttons, the shading, the background, and other attributes. Instead of just

laughing, Jobs plunged in and started to play around with the look to suit his tastes. After about ten minutes he got it the way he liked. His design, not surprisingly, was the one that shipped on the Mac and remained the standard for fifteen years.

Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent design language for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a world-class designer who would be for Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was code-named Snow White, not because of his preference for

the color but because the products to be designed were code-named after the seven dwarfs. The winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was responsible for the look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs flew to the Black

Forest region of Bavaria to meet him and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s passion but also his spirited way of driving his Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per hour.shlf419

Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-America gene for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global” look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sexshlf419

appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion,” a play on the familiar maxim that form follows function. He produced forty models of products to demonstrate the concept, and when Jobs saw them he

proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted immediately for the Apple IIc, featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin grooves for both ventilation and decoration. Jobs offeredaishahai

Esslinger a contract on the condition that he move to California. They shook hands and, in Esslinger’s not-so-modest words, “that handshake launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the history of industrial design.”

Esslinger’s firm, frogdesign,2 opened in Palo Alto in mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract to work for Apple, and from then on everyaishahai

A Bauhaus AestheticUnlike most kids who grew up in Eichler homes, Jobs knew what they were and why they were so wonderful. He liked the notion of simple and clean modernism produced for the masses. He also loved listening

to his father describe the styling intricacies of various cars. So from the beginning at Apple, he believed that great industrial design—a colorfully simple logo, a sleek case for the Apple II—would set the company apart and make its products distinctive.

The company’s first office, after it moved out of his family garage, was in a small building it shared with a Sony sales office. Sony was famous for its signature style and memorable product designs, so Jobs would drop by to

study the marketing material. “He would come in looking scruffy and fondle the product brochures and point out design features,” said Dan’l Lewin, who

worked there. “Every now and then, he would ask, ‘Can I take this brochure?’” By 1980, he had hired Lewin.

His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony receded around June 1981, when he began attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen. The meeting that year focused on Italian style, and it featured the

architect-designer Mario Bellini, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna Agnelli. “I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like